VFL

The Victorian Football League (VFL) is an Australian rules football league in Australia serving as one of the second-tier regional semi-professional competitions which sit underneath the fully professional Australian Football League (AFL). It includes teams from clubs based in the eastern states of Australia: Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, and includes reserves teams for the east coast AFL clubs.

The league evolved from the former Victorian Football Association (VFA), and it has been known by its current name since 1996. For historical purposes, the present-day VFL is referred to as the VFA/VFL, to distinguish it from the present-day Australian Football League, which in turn was known until 1990 as the Victorian Football League and is thus referred to as the VFL/AFL.

The VFA was formed in 1877 and is the second-oldest Australian rules football league, replacing the loose affiliation of clubs that had been the hallmark of the early years of the game. Initially serving a primarily administrative function, the VFA premiership served as the top level of club competition in Victoria until 1896. The VFA became the secondary level of club competition from 1897 after its eight strongest clubs seceded to form the VFL/AFL. From 1897 until 1994, the VFA remained independent from the VFL as Victoria's secondary senior club competition. Although always much less popular than the VFL/AFL, the VFA enjoyed peaks of popularity in the 1940s with a faster-paced rival code of rules, and in the 1970s bolstered by playing on Sundays at a time when the VFL was played solely on Saturdays.

Since 1995, the league has been administered by AFL Victoria (and its predecessors). In 2022, it will comprise 21 teams from throughout the eastern states, nine of which have a continuous VFA heritage. Prior to 2021, the New South Wales- and Queensland-based clubs played in the North East Australian Football League until the NEAFL merged into the VFL, expanding the competition to those states.

AFL Victoria also operates a women's football competition under the Victorian Football League brand, known as the VFL Women's, which was established in 2016.

History

Formative years (1877–1896)

The Victorian Football Association (VFA) was founded on 17 May 1877 at the meeting of club secretaries immediately preceding the 1877 season. It was formed out of a desire to provide a formal administrative structure to the governance of the sport, and it had the power to impose binding decisions on its members on matters including the Laws of the Game, player eligibility and other disputes, as well as to facilitate intercolonial football. Decisions were made based on a vote of the Board of Management, which was composed of two delegates from each senior club, a structure which was retained until the late 1980s. It replaced a system under which the secretaries of the senior clubs met at the beginning of each year to decide on matters of mutual interest, but the system was informal and disputes often went unresolved.

The five foundation senior clubs in the Melbourne metropolitan area were Albert-park, Carlton, Hotham (later North Melbourne), Melbourne and St Kilda. Provincial clubs were also eligible for senior representation on the Association, even though most seldom played matches against the metropolitan teams; Geelong, the nearest provincial club to the metropolis, was the most prominent provincial club, joining the Association in 1877 and playing regularly against metropolitan clubs by 1880. There was no formal system of promotion and relegation between the senior and junior levels, with it largely at a club's discretion whether or not it joined the Association as a paying senior member. The affiliation fee for senior clubs was initially set at one guinea.

Through the first decade of the VFA's existence, the structure of the football season did not change significantly from the informal system which had evolved over previous years. Setting of fixtures was the responsibility of club secretaries rather than the Association itself, and in a typical season, a club could play against other VFA teams, non-VFA clubs, at odds against junior teams (usually twenty players against twenty-three), and in some seasons against intercolonial teams; although as the number of senior clubs increased, the number of matches against non-VFA clubs declined. Prior to the 1888 season, there was no formally endorsed system for awarding a VFA premiership: as had been the case since the early 1870s, the premier club was determined by public and press consensus, which by the mid-1880s was conventionally but informally understood to be the senior club which suffered the fewest losses during the season. Premierships won under this then-informal method are now considered official, and consensus was typically uncontroversial.

In 1888, the VFA first took responsibility for the onfield competition, and introduced its first formal premiership system by adopting a system of premiership points; it also awarded for the first time a premiership cap in the Association's colours to players of the premier team. The Association's influence over the on-field competition grew, and from 1894, the Association assumed responsibility for centrally setting the fixtures and standardising the number of games played by each team.

After the formal introduction of the premiership, the often-changeable collection of senior clubs in the VFA soon became settled at twelve premiership-eligible clubs: , , Fitzroy, Footscray, , , , Port Melbourne, , , South Melbourne and Williamstown; they were joined by a thirteenth club, , in 1892. Three Ballarat-based clubs – Ballarat, Ballarat Imperial and South Ballarat – were also voting members of the VFA through this time, but were not involved in the onfield premiership.

Split (1897–1937)

During the 1890s, there was an off-field power struggle within the VFA between the stronger and weaker clubs, as the stronger clubs sought greater administrative control commensurate with their relative financial contribution to the game. This came to a head in 1896 when it was proposed that gate profits, which were always lower in matches against the weaker clubs, be shared equally amongst the Association clubs; in response to the threat that this might be endorsed on the votes of the weaker clubs, six of the strongest clubs – , , , , and – seceded from the VFA, inviting and to join them, to form the Victorian Football League (VFL), which became the leading senior football body in Victoria. The remaining VFA clubs – Footscray, North Melbourne, Port Melbourne, Richmond and Williamstown – were given the opportunity to compete as a junior competition under and without representation on the VFL's administration, but rejected the offer and continued as an independent body. The two new competitions competed in parallel from their respective 1897 seasons.

The VFA rebuilt to ten clubs over its first independent decade, mostly by adding leading junior clubs to its ranks such as Brunswick, Prahran, West Melbourne, Essendon Town/Association, Preston, Brighton, Northcote and Hawthorn. Because the VFA was independent from the VFL (and, upon its establishment in 1906, the Australasian Football Council), the VFA had the power to set its own rules. The VFA reduced the number of on-field players from twenty to eighteen in 1897, a move followed by the VFL two years later. The VFA tried reducing the number of players further to 17 in 1908, then to 16 in 1912, before reverting to the national standard 18 in 1919. The VFA went into recess during World War I